In business today, it is often necessary for a group of people to gather in a conference room and engage in a conference call via a single telephone situated in the room. In usual practice, the telephone includes speakerphone functionality, so that the people in the room can all participate fully in the conference by listening to the speakerphone and talking into the speakerphone.
In some cases, however, it may be desirable to allow a group of people to engage in a conference via a common telephone without using speakerphone functionality. For instance, the telephone may not have speakerphone functionality, or the telephone might have speakerphone functionality but for one reason or another it may be desirable to conduct the conference without using the speakerphone functionality.
One way to conduct such a conference is to equip each participant with a personal headset or other conferencing device that communicates over a short range wireless connection with the telephone or other base unit. Each conferencing device would include a microphone and speaker and would communicate over a unique, respective wireless channel with the base unit. Thus, the base unit may receive identifiable audio or video from the various local conference participants and may combine and distribute the audio or video to each other local conference participant and to a remote party on the call. Further, the base unit may receive audio or video from the remote call party and may similarly distribute the audio or video to the various local conference participants. In this manner, all of the local conference participants can fully participate in the call with each other and with the remote call party via the base unit.
A problem with this conceptual arrangement can arise, however, in a scenario where the base unit is arranged to support only a limited number of short range wireless connections at a time. For instance, if the base unit is equipped with a Bluetooth transceiver, the Bluetooth transceiver may be of the type that is able to connect with only a limited number of other Bluetooth-equipped devices at a time, and thus the base unit may be unable to engage in Bluetooth communication concurrently with a larger number of Bluetooth-equipped headsets or other conference devices.